


Pastels

by TheVineSpeaketh



Series: The Arts of Domesticity [1]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Fluff, M/M, Pre-Slash, Tiny Robots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-29
Updated: 2015-05-29
Packaged: 2018-04-01 19:06:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4031233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheVineSpeaketh/pseuds/TheVineSpeaketh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He'd been lucky to find Q in his search for a roommate."</p><p>In which Bond is rooming with Civilian!Q, and things are great... or so he thought.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pastels

**Author's Note:**

> This is one fic off my summer to-do list, and I'm excited for it!
> 
> I've had this plot bunny forever and had half of it already completed, and I banged out the rest tonight and thought I'd share.
> 
> This was so much fun to write, and I might do more if the fancy strikes me.
> 
> For now, please enjoy.

The trek up the stairs was a familiar one, each step groaning gently under his feet as it always did. He came to the second floor with relative ease, ignoring the gentle throbbing in his left knee and the way the duffel bag slung over his shoulder rubbed against the gauze taped onto his ribcage, and made his way to the door of his apartment, shuffling through his pockets for his keys. It didn’t take him long to unlock the door, and once he put his keys back into his pocket, he let himself inside, trying to be quiet. It was midnight, after all, and, if he was lucky, his roommate would actually be sleeping like a normal human being.

“Ah, James. You’re back.” No such luck, then.

James walked inside, shutting the door behind him with a tap of his heel, taking a moment to empty his pockets into a small bowl sitting by the door before coming around the corner. His roommate, a scrawny little thing with too much hair and too much going on in his head, was curled up on the couch, his laptop in his lap and his hands flying across the keyboard, his eyes never once glancing up to look at him where he stood near the door.

“Yes,” he said, his voice raspy and low. “I’m back.”

“How was Prague?” his roommate asked, still looking at his computer. He was clearly absorbed in his work, his mouth running on autopilot as his hands, eyes and mind flicked like binary switches in a CPU.

“Milan,” he corrected kindly, setting down his duffel bag and trying to hide his sigh of relief as he stretched out his uninjured side. “And it was pretty nice. It wasn’t too warm, but it’s always sunny there this time of year.” He flicked on the light switch by the door, the room instantly bathing in the warm glow of the lone ceiling light.

“It’s always raining in London,” his roommate replied, seemingly unperturbed by the sudden presence of light, though he did finally look up from his laptop and gave James a little grin, his face no longer bleached by the white glow from his screen. “That’s not an apt comparison.”

“Nothing is an apt comparison to London,” Bond said, and his roommate let out a little snort of pleasure before turning his attention back to his laptop.

“Quite true,” he said. “I have reason to suspect that London exists entirely in its own dimension. It’s like a world of its own. You don’t arrive in London; it just kind of swallows you. One minute you’re touching down in a plane, and the next, you’re on the A5 going thirty miles an hour, you’re considering getting a cat, and you have an apartment that has the _worst_ view.”

Bond pursed his lips, cocking his head to either side before walking to the nearest window and peeking outside. “I wouldn’t say it has the _worst_ view…”

He heard a chuckle from behind him. “Yeah, well,” his roommate said, clearly dividing his attention between Bond and his work. “You haven’t been subjected to staring outside that window all by your lonesome for the past two weeks. Speaking of your trip, how’d the merger go?”

“Swimmingly,” he replied, still looking out the window. “The executives in Milan were considerably interested in becoming a part of the company. It’s really a matter of looking at their business practices now and parsing whether it’s a good move for us as a company or not.”

The lie came out as easily as if it were the truth. In theory, one could even say it _was_ the truth. In this apartment, and this life he’d built with his roommate, James Bond was _not_ a formidable member of the double-o program at MI6, but a liaison for a big company with high ambitions who was subject to a lot of out-of-country trips that kept him away for a while. He was an avid alcohol enthusiast (not entirely a fabrication), a clean person, and generally lived a workaholic’s lifestyle—long days, late hours, and business trips to various locations. He would have lived alone, considering his salary could cover almost any apartment in London, except he wasn’t home often, so he needed someone to keep shop while he was gone and not let the apartment go stale. That was where Q had come in.

He’d been lucky to find Q in his search for a roommate. All of the other applicants had either not gotten past MI6’s preliminary background checks (one of which was even an almost-terrorist with severe leftist leanings, and that simply wouldn’t do), had not clicked correctly with Bond, or, on one memorable occasion, had outright made a few ultimatums that could _not_ be followed. Inquiries and applications had been that way for several months since the search had begun for a suitable roommate for Bond, and he had half considered just giving up and living alone as per his norm when Q had sent in an application at the last minute, complete with a list of the weird things he did—including the fact that he preferred to be called Q on almost all occasions—and his qualifications in terms of living with someone who wasn’t home often.

“I’m a fastidious cleaner in all spaces that are communal,” he had written, “though I should not be expected to have such particular cleaning habits in private spaces. I have a specific system that cannot bear undoing, but I do try to confine it to where I alone will be. I am also a quiet individual with no loud habits with the exception of creating alarm systems, as it is my occupation and, thus, should be expected. I will only run tests on my systems during daylight hours, so there will be no unexpected noises at night unless in an emergency. I am pretty fair-going in terms of being communicative and friendly, though I do require my space now and again. I am known for drifting off while working, so if I make idle chit-chat while working, feel free to respond to me or ignore it at your leisure. I also have a habit of unleashing my creations for test runs, so we may have a few extra security systems installed in our apartment, which I will constantly update you with codes and passwords for so as not to catch you off guard (as some are designed to be either fatal or severely injurious to any and all trespassers).”

All of this and more Q had left on his application along with his number, instructing to call if he was interested in his application. Bond had been pretty enthusiastic about him as a candidate, especially after he had seen off the last applicant, who had been a kindly old lady who Bond couldn’t stand possibly getting in the way of danger. MI6 had mixed feelings about the “unleashing his projects” section, but Bond didn’t see any harm in it; he had broken into many different kinds of security systems over the years without incurring deadly injury, and it wouldn’t hurt to be on the right side of such measures for once. He’d had to thoroughly convince Mallory of it, but in the end, they had come to a grudging agreement over Q, and he’d made the necessary call in order to finalize everything.

Several months later, the pair had well and truly settled in. Bond had gone on several “business trips” so far with little to no suspicious incidents having occurred to his person while abroad, and had returned to find everything intact on the home front as well. The apartment was always just as he had left it, with maybe a few minor alterations (which Q enthusiastically explained, so he was never kept guessing about their nature for long).

Q didn’t seem to be catching on to the true nature of his trips, which was a plus, though Bond knew if he had any kind of opening into that avenue, Q would probably have had his hands on all sorts of classified information within a few minutes. He was incredibly intelligent, and not just when it came to computer systems and security measures. To Bond’s immense surprise and pleasure, he was witty, and could handle Bond’s spitfire conversations and answer his teasing however suited him in turn, even while immersed in his work. He was a sparkling conversationalist and a generally understanding person, letting Bond keep to himself on the nights when “passed out” was an admirable state of being without saying so much as a word, only to greet him as if nothing had transpired the next morning with a cup of tea or an offer for breakfast. He made adorable little robots that did menial tasks around the apartment (Bond’s favorite being one called “Bunny,” which was a modified and slightly shrunken Roomba that vacuumed underneath the sofa and all the little places a normal vacuum couldn’t reach) and kept a tight security system running with little qualms. Bond hadn’t heard of any break-in attempts yet, but he was certain that Q’s security systems would handle any intruders, or at least contact the proper authorities. He truly was something else, and not in a bad way, either.

Of course, genius came with its certain eccentricities, as he had discovered over the course of living with Q. He had the habit of falling asleep on the couch, his laptop still open on his lap and some numbers running in loops on the screen. His bed, upon Bond’s inspection, was neatly made but covered in papers, little mechanical bits, wires, tools, and all sorts of sticky notes with unintelligible sequences of numbers and letters on them. Bond would have sworn up and down that Q was narcoleptic, though he denied it fervently every time he was caught kipping, claiming that working on menial coding tasks like the ones his boss insisted he do between projects helped him fall asleep.

“It’s not narcolepsy,” he’d said one time when Bond had awoken him from his sleep by letting Bunny run noisily over a plastic bag, forcing Q to rise from the couch to rescue the poor thing. “I just keep irregular hours. Whenever I can sleep, I sleep. Work doesn’t wait.”

Bond would’ve said something, if it wasn’t highly hypocritical of him to do so. As it was, he could see the appeal in such logic, and so he stayed his tongue and went to make Q a cup of tea to reintroduce him to the waking world.

As it stood at this very moment, tea seemed like a wonderful idea. “Would you like a cuppa?” he asked, moving toward the kitchen, rolling his bruised shoulder as he went. “I think I’m long overdue for a nice brew.”

“What,” Q called from the living room, “do they not have good tea in Prague?”

“Milan,” Bond called absently back as he rooted through the fridge for the milk. “And they do, in fact, but nothing is quite as relaxing as a tea you made yourself in your own home.”

“Or having tea made for you in your own home,” Q said, his voice absent, and the tapping of keys on his keyboard let James know that he was working again, and thus wouldn’t be responding.

James sighed, setting the milk on the counter and putting water in the kettle, setting it on the stove and turning on the burner before rounding the corner, poking his head out of the kitchen and looking at Q, who was indeed bent over his work again.

“Before you get lost in your work again, I’d like to know if you actually want tea,” he said.

Q jumped a little, looking up from his work and giving a smile, his shaggy hair tousled about his head and his glasses slipping down his nose. He wiggled his toes absently. It was incredibly adorable.

“Sure, I’ll have some,” he said quietly. “Thank you,” he added, looking back down at his work. James smiled at him fondly before moving back into the kitchen, rummaging around for the tea leaves. His phone vibrated in his pocket, and he frowned, pulling it out as he looked through the cupboard. The tea leaves weren’t where he’d left them; that place had been taken by a small contraption that shined a light in his eye before beeping benignly at him. Q must’ve moved the tea again.

“Q, where’d you put the tea leaves?” Bond asked, tapping his password into his phone and putting his thumb on the bioreader before it opened.

“I moved them up to the top of the cupboard,” he called from the living room. “Have you met Holmes?”

James gotten a text from MI6. He looked up at the little robot, whose lens seemed to blink at him in a friendly way. “What, the little thing that shined light in my eye?”

“That’s the one,” Q replied. James shook his head, smiling, before looking back down at his phone. Crap. Something bad had happened in Prague—008 had his hands full with an entire terrorist cell who was trying to gain access to the embassy’s files. He was needed for strategic back up. _Report at 0600 tomorrow morning at Heathrow Airport._

James tapped a reply in the affirmative before locking his phone. “What’s he doing in the cabinet?” he asked, reaching up to the shelf over Holmes’s and grabbing the box of tea leaves, still looking at the robot. It almost seemed to cock its head as it watched him.

“He’s in time out,” Q replied.

The kettle began to squeal, cutting off any reply Bond might have had, and he made to close the door to the cabinet before deciding against it, picking Holmes up gently and setting him in a safe spot on the counter instead. As he prepped the teacups, setting a strainer and dishing leaves on each cup, he asked, “Why is a robot in time out? And in a cupboard, no less?”

“Holmes is supposed to be an easy-to-conceal and adaptable ocular scanner to permit remote access to certain things, like security systems, phones or sensitive files, in case of a loss of password, combination, or on some memorable occasion, fingers.” James grinned, and Q continued from the other room. “He thought it would be funny, however, to blind me on our first test run. So I stuck him in the darkest place in the house.”

James cast a glance at Holmes, who was still sitting on the counter. “I don’t think robots are capable of having a sense of humor, Q,” he said, but he wasn’t entirely sure.

Q appeared in the walkway to the kitchen, making a beeline for his tea and accepting the proffered tin of cubes of sugar from Bond. “He has an adaptable AI, so it’s entirely possible he got it from somewhere. I gave him Bluetooth access, but I didn’t give him any connection to the internet, so I don’t know where he could’ve gotten that particular deviation from.”

“It couldn’t be that he inherited it from his creator, could it?” James asked, and Q paused in his hasty stirring of his tea to give Bond a withering glare. James flapped his hand. “No, no,” he said to himself, leaning against the counter and sipping his tea, “that would be ridiculous.”

“You don’t have to be an arse,” Q said, and he hid his smile poorly behind his teacup. He glanced over at the counter, frowning once he noticed Holmes sitting there. He looked at Holmes in confusion for a second before casting a look at Bond. “For God’s sake,” he said, exasperated, and he set his teacup down before moving over to Holmes, scooping him up gently in his palms and putting him back in the cupboard. Bond couldn’t stop his smile. “You’re going to make a terrible parent if you keep this up. You’re spoiling him. He needs to learn that he made a mistake.”

“Surely an adaptable AI can translate the words ‘you made a mistake’ into some sort of direct order to not make that mistake again,” James said, and he furrowed his brows. “And I doubt I’m going to be a father, so put that image out of your mind.”

Q picked up his cup, leveling James with a deadpan look. “You severely underestimate the deviousness of recently-developed AI,” Q replied. He leaned against the counter, too, except off to the side so he was directly facing Bond. “And what, are you going to be too busy going to places like Prague to father any spawn?”

James snorted. “It was Milan last time,” he said for the third time. “But it’s Prague tomorrow, actually. They’re sending me off on another flight as soon as they can. Apparently something’s gone tits-up in our Prague division and they need someone over there to smooth out the wrinkled edges.”

“Ah,” Q said, sipping his tea. “You’re leaving in the morning, I assume?”

“As early as I possibly can,” he said, which was a lie. He knew he could probably leave earlier than that—hell, he’d gone as far as California with an hour’s notice before his flight took off.

“I’ll hold down the fort, then,” Q said, already looking contemplatively at the tile on the kitchen floor. “Might be a good time for me to test out a few security systems without bothering you. I might even get Holmes fixed and sent to whoever commissioned him.”

“Oh, not Holmes,” Bond said, grinning at Q as he looked up at him. “I was starting to get attached to him. Maybe you could build another one, and name it something deplorable. Like…” He pretended to think. “Mallory. That way I won’t get attached.” He hoped Mallory had bugged the apartment without him knowing, just so he could hear the barb.

Q, meanwhile, simply scoffed. “I can’t believe you’re already attached to the menace,” he murmured under his breath. “I’ll make another one, then. I’ll also paint it a silvery color instead of white. You seem to be drawn to pristine, white things.”

“You’re the best,” Bond said, finishing up his tea and depositing the cup in the sink. “I’d best pop off to bed, then. I have to be at the airport by six, so if I’m lucky, I can catch about four hours’ sleep before heading off.”

“You can sleep more on the plane,” Q said, but nevertheless moved toward Bond and put his own cup in the sink. At Bond’s movement to roll up his sleeves, Q waved him away, tugging up the sleeves of his cardigan. “Bugger off, I’ll put everything away.”

“Thanks,” Bond said, and Q murmured something in reply. “I’ll see you sometime in a week or so.”

“Yeah,” Q replied, already engrossed in his dishwashing, his eyes staring down at the cups in his hands but clearly unseeing, and Bond knew he’d lost him to some other train of thought again. “Have a good trip. Stay safe.”

Something about the way he said it almost made Bond pause, before he decided he was reading too much into it; it was simply the default request people made of others when traveling. “You too,” he shot back jokingly, and the last thing he heard of Q was a small snort of laughter.

(~~~~)

A week later, Bond climbed out of the MI6 car, feeling a little worse for wear but otherwise doing well. The terrorist cell in Prague had been successfully eradicated, as far as MI6 could tell, and Mallory had told Bond to return to London and rest, insisting that 008 was capable of handling the last few stragglers. Bond thought of his nice warm bed, of cozy cups of tea at midnight, of Bunny bumping his door at three in the morning (having gotten lost vacuuming along the edges of the rooms) and of Holmes greeting him upon opening the cabinet, and decided that yes, it was about time he went home.

Of course, due to his irregular hours, it was roughly three in the afternoon once he got to London, so he’d had to keep his jacket on to hide his new injuries—a re-injured shoulder and a burn on his right forearm roughly the size of a pan—from any of his neighbors, and, most importantly, Q.

He slung his duffel bag over his shoulder, buzzing his way into the building and deciding to check the mail before going upstairs to the apartment. Q was rotten at checking their mail, but yet he always seemed to have their bills paid on time and their rent in every month, so James really couldn’t complain.

As he flicked through his keyring for their mailbox key, shuffling footsteps approached behind him, and he looked over his shoulder to see Mrs. Donoghue from the apartment down the hall from his. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Donoghue,” James said, and Mrs. Donoghue smiled, opening her mailbox with her key.

“Afternoon, James,” she said. “I see you just got back from a business trip again?”

“I certainly did,” he replied, unlocking his own mailbox, unsurprised to see copious amounts of mail stuffed into the cramped space. He frowned, focusing on shuffling the mail around until he could free it from the confines of the mailbox.

“You’re just in time, then,” Mrs. Donoghue said, smiling quietly to herself as she flicked through a postcard from her eldest and a letter from her youngest’s college congratulating her on having an honor student for a child. “Your boyfriend just stopped by with some roses for you. I told him you weren’t back yet.”

James nodded absently, pulling a few letters out of the mailbox, when a cold feeling shot through him that instantly translated into calculated numbness. “Boyfriend?” he asked, pretending to sound caught-out.

“Yep,” Mrs. Donoghue said with no small modicum of self-satisfaction. “You don’t have to lie to me, sweetie, I know about it.” She frowned. “I’m just a little upset that you have a boyfriend, to be honest. I was kind of hoping you and darling Q would get serious someday. You’ve been living together for a while now.”

James laughed nervously, putting his mail in his duffel bag and subtly taking out his Walther. “I’m afraid Q isn’t interested in me,” he said. “Believe me, I’ve asked. George has been pretty good to me, though.” He smiled in a friendly manner. “When did he get here?”

“Just a few minutes ago,” Mrs. Donoghue said.

“I’ll just go on up, then,” he replied, shouldering his bag and moving away. “Thank you, Mrs. Donoghue. And have a lovely day.”

“You too, lad,” she replied, and as soon as she looked down at her mail, Bond was moving, walking calmly past the elevator and pushing the metal door open for the stairs.

As soon as the door clanged behind him, he was off, sprinting up the stairs as fast as his legs could carry him up to the third floor. He readied his Walther, steadying himself before pushing the door open, peering around the hallway down the sight of his gun. The hallway was empty, and the door to their apartment, from what he could see, was closed.

He moved toward the door as swiftly and quietly as he could, unable to hear any noise from the other side of their door as he grew nearer to it. With any luck, Q hadn’t been home when the man had broken in, and all Bond would have to deal with was a simple ambush attempt. Worst case scenario, Q _had_ been home when the man had attempted to break in, and—

His world narrowed down to his work, and suddenly this was another mission. With practiced ease, he readied himself to kick open the door. Huffing a breath and steadying his heart, ignoring the pounding of his pulse in the burn on his arm and the bruise still lingering in his shoulder, he kicked open the door and strode inside.

And stopped. Lowered his gun. Looked coldly across the room.

The window was open, the drapes fluttering gently in the breeze, and Q was manhandling a man dressed in a crisp black suit over the windowsill. He had frozen as soon as Bond had kicked open the door, and was now looking at him, his expression strangely blank.

For a moment, the two stared at one another. Then, Bond threw his duffel bag off to the side. “Are you hurt,” he said, not even bothering to phrase it like a question.

“No,” Q replied. He jerked his head in the direction of the man currently half out the window. “He, however, is.”

Bond looked at the man, unable to see any of his features, as that was the half hanging out the window. “Pull him back inside,” he said, his gun still in his hand, and Q complied, grasping the man’s shoulders and yanking him back inside. He hit the floor with a heavy thud. There was drool running out of his mouth.

Bond approached him, kneeling down next to him and feeling him for a pulse. It was faint and fluttery, as if he’d been incapacitated almost completely. He looked up at Q, who was standing next to him, his hands spasming. He didn’t look to be in shock, though, more like he was calculating his next move.

“What happened?” he asked, and Q didn’t hesitate to answer.

“He came in through the front door like a fucking idiot,” Q replied. “One of my systems got him. Electrocuted him half to hell.” He scrunched his nose. “The whole apartment smells like burnt hair.” Bond took a deep breath. It did. “Anyway, he kind of went down after that. I figured I’d dispose of him like I did the others.” Bond’s brows furrowed, but Q continued as if he hadn’t noticed. “Don’t worry, I checked your room. Nothing’s been touched. I don’t think you’ve been compromised.”

Bond stared evenly at the man for a few moments. He didn’t look like he was going to come out of his stupor any time soon. Q stood next to him, thrumming anticipation and radiating disapproval, but he wasn’t upset or afraid. Bond huffed a small sigh and straightened up, dusting off his suit and putting the safety on his Walther. “Where’s the duct tape?” he asked.

“Kitchen, in the cupboard behind Holmes,” Q replied, still staring down at the body, and James moved toward the kitchen, opening the cabinet and sparing a glance at Holmes, allowing his eye to be read by him before grabbing the duct tape and moving back out into the living room. He kneeled next to the man, pulling a kerchief from his lapel and wiping the drool off his face before tearing off a strip of duct tape and putting it over his mouth. Then, he set to work duct taping his wrists behind his back and his legs together in two places before setting the duct tape on the coffee table and turning to Q, who was still glancing down at the man like he was a problem to be solved. Upon Bond’s scrutiny, though, he met his gaze.

There was silence for a long, strangled moment. Then, Bond said, “Do you fancy a cuppa?”

Q thought about it, then shrugged. “Sure, why not,” he replied, and they headed to the kitchen.

(~~~~)

MI6 extracted the man from the apartment and took him in, and the entire time, Q and Bond stayed in the kitchen. Bond asked Q what he knew, and Q had replied honestly.

“I don’t know absolutely everything about what you do or where it is you’re actually going,” he began, “but I do know a few things. I know you aren’t a businessman working for a large international company. I know you’re working for the government, but I’m not entirely sure what branch. I’m well aware that what you do requires you to kill people, and that you are an asset to your people. All the knowledge that I currently don’t have is knowledge I don’t have by choice; believe me when I tell you that, if I so desired, I could have you entire life’s history in front of me in less than five minutes.”

“I see,” Bond said, enjoying his tea. He’d put Holmes back on the counter again. Q hadn’t protested this time, though he had shot him a look again. “When did you first grow suspicious?”

“When the first stranger broke into our apartment,” he replied. “Apparently she wasn’t expecting pepper spray—one of my clients got incredibly creative with a system set up for his office—or obviously she would’ve attempted to use the window. Which would’ve burned her.”

Bond nodded, finishing his sip of tea before asking, “How many break-ins have there been so far?”

“Roughly seventeen,” Q said with a shrug, and James glared at him. “What?” he asked defensively.

“And you didn’t think to tell me about them?” he asked stormily.

“Nothing happened,” Q replied. “All the break-ins happened roughly the same way: they tried to break in, my security system got them, they fell over, and I threw them out the window. I’ve kept regular tabs on your laptop’s system updates and files—as well as your phone, to a lesser degree—and found no untoward changes. I didn’t read anything,” he added at Bond’s severe look, “merely checked to see if anything had changed irregularly or had any telltale signs of being accessed. Nothing happened to anything we owned except one singed spot in the floor that I’d already paid the landlord for in damages.” He took a sip of his tea, not breaking eye contact with James.

James set his teacup down, crossing his arms over his chest. “So you’re telling me,” he said, his voice low, “that we’ve had seventeen break-ins by trained professionals, and you’ve never once decided that maybe you should tell me about it? Or leave?”

“I weighed the risks after the first break-in,” Q said, his tone suggesting offense. “Don’t take me for an idiot, James. I thought about it and I decided it was worth staying. I got plenty of real-world mileage on my new security systems, and nobody got hurt, so there wasn’t any reason for me to pack up and leave. Besides,” he said in a quieter tone, “you’re fair with the rent.”

James’s glare did not abate. “You could’ve been killed.”

“I am aware of that, yes,” Q replied. “It was a risk I was more than willing to take.”

James’s eyes narrowed. “It may have been a risk _you_ were willing to take, but it would’ve weighed heavily on my conscience if you had died during any of those circumstances.”

“Then why get a roommate in the first place?” Q asked, scathing, and he set his cup down, looking James in the eye. “Why let me in here at all if you _knew_ things like this were bound to happen? Why tell me to turn tail and run now as if this was a brand new situation?”

James knew why. Looking into Q’s furious eyes, he knew exactly why he was telling him staying was a mistake. He saw it when he came home late at night to find Q asleep with his laptop; he saw it when he opened the cabinet and couldn’t find the tea; he saw it when Bunny raced across the floor in a dizzying sort of malfunction and Q stumbled after her; he saw it when Q murmured angrily at some piece of tech; he saw it when Q left him little notes about new security codes, all referencing some kind of tea or something on their grocery list. Every day, James saw his reasons, and the list grew longer and longer until his roommate became more than just a roommate, more than just a potential nameless casualty. He knew why he wanted Q to leave, but he didn’t say.

Q watched him for a few moments before he deflated, turning back toward his tea. “I’m not leaving, no matter what you say,” he said, sipping from his cup. “So get over it.”

James watched him for a moment, tracking his every movement as he left his cup in the sink, moving over to Holmes and, after looking at him for a second, instead reaching for the house phone, picking it up and dialing a number. “I’m in the mood for Thai,” he said, holding the phone to his ear and turning to James. “You want any?”

James looked at him for a moment. “Sure,” he said, his voice still low, and Q nodded, walking out of the kitchen and into the living room. James sighed, standing up from his lean against the counter and listening to Q moving around the apartment. Life had changed, but it seemed as though it had stayed exactly the same. “I’ll convince you to leave yet, Q,” he said, looking down at Holmes and imagining the paperwork nightmare that awaited him back at MI6. His shoulder throbbed, his burn probably needing some aloe. But he was content.

Holmes blinked back at him, curious and friendly.

“No you won’t,” Q said from the other room, and he placed their order.

**Author's Note:**

> So, posting this, I had a little weird glitch where two parts of two separate sentences were spliced into each other at the very end. I've scanned the sentences in question and found nothing off, but if something reads incorrectly or has been erased in a weird way mid-sentence, please don't hesitate to tell me. I want to make all my works easy to read, and your feedback in that area is extremely valuable. Thank you! :D
> 
> Edit 2: Part 2 is restored! Thank you for your patience. :D I promise I'll make no such mistakes in the future!
> 
> Come visit me on [tumblr!](http://exacteyewriting.tumblr.com)


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